Yes, I agree there is an issue. The list that now appears in question B3 has changed since I made the submission. From memory the list originally included options for temperature extremes and precipitation amount which (per my comment) I did not tick. However I did tick Precipitation Probability as that is clearly included in the Met Office open data.

This seems to be a wider problem i.e. not confined to the weather forecast submission. The list of options for question B3 in the location category has changed as well: “Data available for entire country” is now on there twice.

Can someone clarify what is seen as being the difference in the availability of the Met Office data from 2015 results to 2016 assessment?

The Met Office say that they provide observations and forecast data on their DataPoint service. Whilst it does require registration it is freely available but that’s been the case all along so there is no change of status there. They would like to be clear why their mark has changed from 2015.

Not sure what the thinking was, but the relevant question has changed since last year. Previously the mark was awarded if the data was available online. This year it’s only awarded if the data is available online without a registration requirement. The 2016 version of the question is: “Are the data available online without the need to register or request access to the data?”

Please my belated reply on this topic. Yes this year we applied a different definition of the weather data category. Last year we could not find many short-term forecasts that would span more than three days (starting with the current day). So we changed this and shortened the time span of weather forecasts. On the other hand we were more vigilant to make sure that temperature, wind, and precipitation values are included in our reference dataset.